"The worlds leading green journalists on climate" at the Guardian's "Environment blog" are ridiculing people who think that recent climate events in Australia are not a sign of global warming:
Australia had its biggest and longest heatwave on record in January creating perfect conditions for hundreds of bushfires. For seven days straight, the average maximum temperature across the country topped 39C.
Then there were the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, which killed more than 170 people. The 2011 Queensland floods caused $5bn of damage after an area the size of France and Germany was declared a disaster zone.
Of course these extreme events, like others being shared around the world of late, had absolutely nothing whatsoever, not even in the slightest, how very dare you even contemplate it, to do with man-made climate change.
But like my grandpa used to say, he who laughs last, laughs longest:
Professor John McAneney, the director of Risk Frontiers, an independent research group funded mostly by the insurance industry, says that based on a database of natural hazard events in Australia, including some dating back to 1803, "there has been no increase in the frequency of natural hazard events since 1950".
But what of the spiralling insurance claims in the wake of hailstorms, floods, cyclones (think Yasi at $1.4 billion) and bushfires ($4 billion for Victoria's Black Saturday firestorms)?
"What we can see very clearly is that when this dataset … is corrected for the increases in numbers of buildings at risk and their value, no long term trend remains," Professor McAneney said.
''It is indisputable that the rising toll of natural disasters is due to more people and assets at risk."
He said US hurricane modelling to identify a signal climate change is contributing to storm strength suggests it could be a while before the data is definitive. Averaging 18 different climate models, "it's going to take 260 years", he said.
"This whole thing about climate change being responsible for an increase in extreme weather, or natural disasters, is just a fiction really."
Read the entire article here
2 comments:
Actually global cooling does result in more extreme weather because it causes an increased difference in temperature between the poles and the equator. It is this gradient that meteorologists inform us drives the weather.
Laurence... how dare you drag thermodynamics into this. Just because the 2nd law of thermodynamics says that it is the ratio of diference between the hot & cold resovouir temperatures and the hot resovouir temperature ie. (Th - Tc)/Th that drives all thermodynamic processes, and the fact that in a warming world the poles will warm faster than the equator.. and that observations from the Voyager probes confirms that extreme weather is more prevalent on the outer planets... which are much colder than the inner oners... doesn`t mean that thermodynamics applies here... DENIER (sarc)
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